- to be fed-up of people thinking that my generation had it easy regarding housing?

[PUER125]

I often read comments on Mumsnet, saying that housing was affordable in a way that it isn't now.
If we take todays mortgage of £200,000 at 3% interest, a repayment mortgage would cost £11,376 per year. This equates to 42% of the average UK wage of £27,000.
In 1990, having left my husband whilst pregnant with my second child, and buying him out of the marital home, my mortgage was £40,000 and the interest rate 15%. Repayments were £6144 per year and the average wage was £13,760. This equated to 44.65% in mortgage costs.
And whilst I am having a rant, I am also fed-up of young people complaining that they will have to work until they are 67 before they can claim their pension.
With the majority of young people going to university, they don't enter the work force until they're 21, giving them a working life of 46 years.
My generation left school at 16/18, and we too shall work until we are 67. A work life of 49 years.
Earlier generations started work at 14/15 and retired at 65, a working life of 50 years, many of them worked in manual labour.
Each generation has their own difficulties and hardships. I shouldn't like to be starting out now; nor should I have liked to belong to an older generation.
Whilst being a single-parent, working full-time, was not easy, I coped; just as countless women before and after me have.
Can we please have a little more understanding of generations other than our own, instead of the resentment so often found on these pages?

Deposits are hard to get now and they were then, there were only high street lenders and strict income multiples.

You could get loans for the deposit, you were not supposed to but people did.
There was also MIRAS, tax relief for each person buying.

Re: degree escalation- it isn’t that one cannot do the job without a degree, but rather when shortlisting candidates for a position, most employers will take the people with degrees in most professional settings. Unfortunately there are just too many people out there with good degrees from decent universities, so if you don’t have one, you just aren’t as competitive as other candidates in many settings.

It is getting to the point where an MA/MSc is what a BA was 20 years ago to differentiate job applicants.

“If we take todays mortgage of £200,000 at ...”

Yep, there’s your issue, right there.

I am older generation, paid sky high interest rates when I bought my first flat (for £36k on a £9k salary), had an endowment policy that I was lucky did just scrape the repayment when it matured (plenty didn’t), etc etc.

I now have a modest home, NONE of this will be possible in the SE for my Dc.

And like it or not, many jobs are in London and we need people to do them: London is one of the very few net contributors to the country as a whole.

I'm nearly 50. I bought my first flat (huge, 2 bedrooms, garage, great location) for £70k when on a salary of £30k, around 25 years ago. 5% deposit of £3.5k.

That flat is now worth around £600k, salary for similar job is now around £50k.

Of course it's much harder for the current generation, and I didn't pay uni fees, actually received a maintenance grant and rent rebate whilst at uni, walked into a professional level well paid job after uni.

My DC's won't have any of those advantages. They are at secondary school but I can't see things improving by the time they are looking for jobs and housing in 10 years time.

The pension thing OP - my generation left school at 16 and can not retire till 67. So 51 working years.

Pointless hate - everyone's fault.
Too many people for the available infrastructure - poor planning.
Right to buy - thatcher and those who did it ( but we are all selfish)
Refusal to elect governments that would raise taxes - fault of the current electorate.
London unsustainable - rest of the country say ' so what?' But it does matter - but no willingness to act from politicians or people.

Stop screaming for a time machine and check the mirror.

We definitely had it easier. Mortgages are far more difficult to get now and you need a much bigger deposit. I bought my first house without a deposit at all. None of my generation had to rack up £thousands in tuition fees and jobs that now require a degree were available to people with "O" levels (GCSEs). It's bloody rubbish beng young now. I feel very sorry for them.

I benefitted from a 100% mortgage in 2004.

Of course house prices were lower, but before the 80s you needed a deposit and mortgages were hard to get. The 100% mortgages led to a higher rate of repossessions. I remember the high rate of repossessions during the 80s.

I've interviewed trainee teacher applicants who can't speak in standard english

OMG someone on my PGCE couldn't use standard English, it was all, "We is..."

One of the things that was noticed in my placements was that I pick up on student's English. In the classroom we use standard English, if they complain I speak to them in really broad Yorkshire using a lot of local words so they get the point.

One day they will be taking exams and they need standard English for that.

YABU

I think the lack of rental properties and sky-high rents, plus the total lack of security for those renting in the private sector, is one of the reasons why so many people want to buy, which in turn drives up prices.

My lovely colleague, who has lived like a pauper for years and lived entirely in house shares, has just managed to buy her first flat at the age of 30. She wanted to buy because she realised it was the only she'd be able to afford to live on her own - the £700 a month it costs to rent a flat here (south coast) is far more than her mortgage. She's not on a fantastic salary, either - it's less than £30k.

I think that if the rents were controlled and there was more security of tenure, demand for homes to buy would ease and prices would fall. Alternatively, BTL landlords might just sell up, which would also make prices fall.

The other problem is that no government ever wants to do anything that might make house prices fall. The majority of people in the UK own their houses, and anything that leads to a drop in the value of what is most people's biggest asset would probably make that government unelectable for a good few years.

And anyone who's old enough to recall the property crash of the early 90s, the huge number of repossessions and people trapped in negative equity for years would hate to see that happen again.

100% mortgages were common until 2007 when everything went tits up.

When I got a house, 95% mortgages were rare. Most were 90%. Because then house prices went down as well as up. It is once house prices started to just rise that 100% mortgages were seen as viable, until house prices went down again and we had repossessions.

I bought my present house for £49k and I was earning £17k. I had about £13k in equity from the sale of my previous house. The house is now worth about £400k and the current salary for my old job is now £30k.

When I moved here, this house was more or less a straight swap for the house I had in Croydon. I just looked on Zoopla and the house I sold would be worth around £300k now. I was a bit surprised to see that Croydon prices had gone up less than prices in this part of Sussex.

Also to remember, we had no clue exactly how much property would rise in value over the years. The average working class person just wanted to 'own' their own home rather than have a council house. We didn't buy thinking 'oh goody! this house is £18000 now but will be worth 4/5/6 times more in 3 decades time!' Savvy more informed or wealthier people would have known that but we were clueless. We just worried about keeping up the payments and hoped it would work out. There was struggle, insecurity and crossed fingers just like there is now.

But PUER, you bought a house for £40,000 to start with.
I always use DHs parents as an example, early 80s FIL was earning £500+ Working on building sites- they bought their house for £15k. Until quite recently my husband was making £500ish a week take home when we were paying £700 a month rent. FILs mortgage was £200ish a month. So the rate of earnings hasn’t always gone up in relation.

I’d also quite like to point out that not everyone goes to university and doesn’t enter the working world until 21+. I know maybe 4 people who have been lucky enough to do so, but on the whole most are like DH who went straight into the building trade at 15/16- granted it’s not as physically hard as it was in FILS day, but it’s still tough labour intensive work, which I can’t see many lads being able to keep up until the age of 67+

Relatively well off baby boomers need to wind their necks in and realise how good they had/have it.

I’m mid 40s and so much luckier than those in their 20s/early 30s. No uni debt, bought a house that’s tripled in value, low mortgage debt, can afford school fees. There is no way I would have been able to attain any of that on our wages if we were younger.

Yes I worked from the age of 14, but that’s still true for many working class kids.

Politicians pander to the needs of the old as that’s the group who vote. The sooner the voting age is reduced the better.

WingsOnMyBoots, not sure I understand your point. I don't think anyone is accusing boomers of deliberately taking advantage of cheap housing at the expense of the younger generation. That's just how it's panned out. But the issue is that it's become so difficult to buy a house that people in your generation who scraped and saved to pay the mortgage (and no doubt worked very hard to do so) now are not in a position where they can get a mortgage and buy a house at all, even if they do work that hard. Surely it's incumbent on the boomer generation (as well as all the others) to try to fix that rather than just hold up their hands and say, oh well, we didn't know the house would go up so much in value when we bought it? Or even worse - to try to say that it's not any more difficult now when it provably is?

I am the last (youngest) of the baby boomers, and broke - pension will be a problem, etc.

But it was nowhere near as hard as it will be for my Dc.

When you consider quality of life, there are many more hints to take into consideration. Leaving aside the obvious things like health and well being, the expectation of what is a reasonable standard of living is very different now, from what it was twenty, thirty or forty years ago.

As a student I lived in a shared flat with minimal heating, a kitchen and bathroom shared between several flats and no washing machine, or TV. I used public transport and didn’t have a car.

Today, most people who expect to have central heating, their own bathroom and kitchen, TV etc. Obviously, since technology has moved on, things available now weren’t then, so the comparisons are unequal.

I’m not saying that either is right or wrong, just that they’re different. Maybe expectations are different too. But there’s no getting away from the fact that house prices in many areas of the country are inflated beyond the means of many. At least, not without help.

Let’s just take the last 10/12 years.

We bought our home in 2006. Since then the value has almost doubled.

Has our take home pay doubled? Has it fuck.

There is no way on god’s green earth we’d be able to buy now, not in the same area at least. And if we moved further out then the commute to my job would not be viable; I already do 2 hours each way.

I honestly dread to think about how my dc are going to be able to afford anything. In an ideal world we’d have the funds to buy them their own homes now, but of course we don’t AND we’d be screwing over other people (renters) to boot.

There is so much mis information on this thread.

Yes you can get a house in the SE for £200,000

Miras finished in 1987, if I remember correctly.

15% interest only lasted for a year but oy was still 14%13%12%11%10%9% etc in the run up to 15% and then back down again.

I don't have much to add here - it's all been said.

Yes, every generation has challenges. But with housing prices and student loans, the experience of my generation (early 30's) is wildly different to our parents'. Financial stability seems fantastical to most of my friends (other than the ones with some serious family cash).

Without exception, everyone I know who still lives in London either:

• lives in a property owned by their wealthy parents;
• owns a property because their wealthy parents gave them an enormous desposit; or
• earns a very large salary, ideally as part of a high-earning couple.

That's it. All of my less-well-off friends have been forced out of London, which is dreadful. They could scrimp and make it work in their early 20's, but living in a 4-bed flatshare when you want to be starting a family is much less appealing. It's a mess.

I’m late 40’s and had it MUCH easier compared to anyone younger than me.

First salary £10k - bought house £32k - so 3 times wage

Current salary £45k - bought house £550k - so 12 TIMES MY WAGE (obviously have huge deposit from climbing property ladder)

Tiny student loans of about £1500 - paid off 20 years ago

Anyone my age or older who doesn’t think they had housing easy is an eejit